Back before the Vaucluse criminal court after a week’s absence for health reasons, the 71-year-old accused spoke for the first time about his personality.
The victim appears to be in the dock. Dominique Pelicot, back before the Vaucluse criminal court on Tuesday, September 17, after a week of absence for health reasons, spoke for the first time all morning about his personality. The septuagenarian maintains his recognition of the facts: “I am a rapist, like those in this room”he says in a confident voice, contrasting with the more somber tone he adopts for the rest of his testimony.
But, throughout the morning, Dominique Pelicot also seemed to want to justify himself. And almost, at times, to exonerate himself. “We are not born perverts, we become perverts”, he replied to the president of the court, Roger Arata, who had just listed the conclusions of the experts who met him. They concluded that he had “a personality structured in a perverse mode”, “low empathy”, “low guilt”, “an extremely weak capacity for introspection”, “multiple paraphilic deviations” (sexual practice that differs from acts traditionally considered normal) and “high criminological danger”.
“Although it is paradoxical, I have never considered my wife as an object. Unfortunately, videos show the opposite“, says the man who is accused of having raped and had his ex-wife, Gisèle Pelicot, raped by dozens of strangers for nearly ten years. “Unfortunately”. As if the nine years of abuse inflicted on his wife, between 2011 and 2020, were a matter of fate. Invited to react to the accused’s initial statements, she confided in court: “It is very difficult for me to hear, even today, that he is aware of having committed these acts of rape and barbarity against me, because not for a single second could I doubt this man. I loved him for fifty years.”
Sitting in his box (in accordance with the recommendations of the forensic expert), dressed in a gray overshirt, Dominique Pelicot oscillates between a clear intention of repentance and the desire to link the facts alleged to his childhood. Thus, he recounts his life at the beginning of the hearing, insisting on the two episodes of sexual violence that he says he experienced and that he recounted several times during the investigation. The accused claims to have been raped, at the age of 9, by a nurse while he was hospitalized. “A guy in a white coat said: ‘My name is Basile, do you want some candy?’. I didn’t think of that…”he said in tears.
Then, at the age of 14, while working on a construction site as an apprentice, he was allegedly forced to have sex with a woman in a gang rape. “They grabbed me by the collar and told me: ‘She’s going to deflower you’. They put their nose in my genitals, I can still smell it. I immediately threw up.”he relates, still shaken. He also mentions his father, whom he described to the personality investigator as “violent, angry and rigid”swearing to himself, he had told him, “never to be like him”.
Dominique Pelicot then stops, his voice choked with emotion, on this “nice meeting” July 1971 with Gisèle Pelicot. He cries. “I was very happy with her. She was the opposite of my mother: completely rebellious. I had three children, grandchildren, whom I never touched.”he assures. The septuagenarian listens to him attentively: she has put her sunglasses back on and lowers her head. The 71-year-old accused repeats several times that he has never committed any pedophile act. “I have never touched a child, I will never touch one”he hammered home to the attorney general, who questioned him on this point.
His answers to other questions are more ambivalent. When the assessor asks him if he is modest, he answers in the negative: “Just because you’ve been to a naturist beach once or twice doesn’t mean you’re an exhibitionist,” he says. As if he didn’t understand what she was referring to. She reminds the accused that her son, Florian, said he witnessed sex scenes between his parents when he was sleeping in the same room as them. “I don’t know, I don’t remember him witnessing it.”reports Dominique Pelicot, lapidary.
The assessor then questions him about why he has meticulously preserved and classified ten years of videos and photos of the rapes of his wife, pointing out that the experts see him as a “collector”. “First, there was an element of pleasure, but it was also a measure of insurance. Today, thanks to this, we can find those who participated.”he believes, not hesitating to position himself as a benefactor, whom the investigators should almost thank. “They did their job very well,” he slips elsewhere.
Stéphane Babonneau, one of Gisèle Pelicot’s advisors, asks her, relaying a question from his client: “Why, while you were watching the spectacle of his decline, did you not find the will to stop what you were doing to him?”. “I also suffered from seeing her like that, but the addiction was stronger”retorts the graying retiree, illustrating his egocentrism and his lack of empathy, described by psychiatrists.
The same tone is heard when the lawyer reminds him that he put his ex-wife at risk of contracting HIV, since one of the men who raped her six times was a carrier of the disease. “I couldn’t ignore the risks.”he said first, emphasizing: “I never left her alone, I was always there”. He also passes the buck to his co-accused: “He gave me a test, apparently it was wrong.”
“When do we become perverted?” Antoine Camus, one of the lawyers for the civil party, then asks him.We become one when we meet someone who gives us the possibilities: the internet… Then it becomes perverse, yes”, he answers weakly, as if he had been conditioned to act, in a form of determinism that was beyond him.
When the lawyer asks him how it feels to have “took on board dozens of strangers” in his “criminal scheme”, Dominique Pelicot finds much more confidence. “I didn’t pick anyone up, they came to pick me up themselves. They asked me, I said yes. They accepted, they came. I didn’t handcuff anyone to come to my house.”he retorts without blinking. Anxious, perhaps, not to fall alone.